PoemWall

What is this?

PoemWall is an anonymous public wall where you don't post your message directly.

  1. You write a phrase.
  2. Your browser transforms it.
  3. The wall stores only the transformed result.
The output is a short, surreal sentence built from a fixed vocabulary. Your original text is never stored. It cannot be recovered. What appears on the wall is a residue; a cryptographic echo.

Why does it work like this?

Most anonymous walls eventually become unusable.
Spam. Hate. Bots. Chaos.
In addition, posts on these wall are stored on a central server. Once the central server is gone, the wall is gone.

PoemWall takes a different approach.
Instead of moderating content after it’s posted, it changes what posting means:

The result is a space where: It's moderation by construction.

Proof of Work? Why? Is this mining cryptocurrency?

No. There is no blockchain. There are no tokens. No one is making money. No wallets exist.

You can verify this for yourself. The project is open source. The application is not obfuscated.

When you see "Solving anti-spam puzzle" or a short delay before posting, your browser is solving a tiny computational puzzle. This is called proof-of-work. Think of it like a digital postage stamp. Sending one letter is cheap. Sending thousands of letters is costly.

What actually happens when I post?

In plain language

  1. You type a message.
  2. Your browser converts it into a hash (a one-way fingerprint).
  3. That hash is used to select words from curated word lists.
  4. A sentence is constructed from those words.
  5. Your browser proves it did a small amount of work.
  6. Only the generated sentence is shared.
Your original message never leaves your device.

In technical terms

  1. The input is hashed using a cryptographic function.
  2. The resulting bytes are used as indices into fixed word arrays.
  3. A deterministic grammar template assembles the sentence from the hash value.
  4. A proof-of-work nonce is computed such that the post meets a minimum difficulty (conceptually similar to Hashcash).
  5. Posts are stored in a distributed database.
  6. Clients independently verify proof-of-work, phrase vocabulary, and freshness before rendering.
There is no central moderation server. Each client decides what is valid and what to display.

Why constrain the vocabulary?

Language carries power. Some words create harm regardless of intent.

Instead of attempting to filter arbitrary user text, PoemWall only allows words from a curated set. Every sentence on the wall is composed from those lists. This keeps the wall abstract, strange, and expressive, without allowing direct abuse.

Is it art?

Maybe.

It's a machine that turns private input into public abstraction. It's a system where constraint produces meaning. It's a small experiment in anonymity, friction, distributed systems, and transformation.

It sits somewhere between generative poetry, cryptographic protocol, and internet shitposting.
You decide what it is.

What is stored?

Only the following, nothing more:

Your original message is not stored and cannot be reconstructed. It is gone forever once posted to the wall.

No personally identifable information is kept, including your IP address or any browser info.

Where is the data stored?

Data is stored in a distributed peer-to-peer database. It is replicated to many servers.

Only the aforementioned data is stored in the distributed database. Nothing else is retained or available.

Why does it feel weird?

Because it is.

PoemWall is not designed for virality. It's designed to see what happens when anonymous speech is filtered through mathematics and constraint.

Sometimes the output is beautiful. Sometimes it's uncanny. Sometimes it's absurd.

That's part of the point.

Can you delete any poems?

No. Due to the inherent nature of the database, a poem will theoretically live forever once added to the database. Data can be marked as deleted, but never erased completely.

This should not be a problem, as no personal data is stored in the database, and messages cannot be reconstructed from any data.